Sympathy for the abject: (re)assessing assemblages of waste with an embedded artist-in-residence

Abstract

The assemblages of (post)industrial neoliberal society include the production of vast quantities of post-consumer materials categorized as waste, which for many appears to vanish from everyday spaces. But rather than make it disappear in any final sense, recycling and disposal processes simply move it in new forms into new places within the global flows of waste. In urban contexts, the abject category of waste must be expelled from the sanitary spaces and subjectivities of daily routines, yet its corresponding absence in everyday perception obviates the urgency of action. One approach to unbundling the abject residue of contemporary society without instigating castastrophic rupture of social orders is through the aestheticization of the expelled. Artists working in the realm of abjection can serve as agents disrupting and redefining boundaries and social imaginaries of the status quo. In this paper we examine an artist-in-residence at the Edmonton (Canada) Waste Management Centre, arguing that the Deleuzian assemblages erasing the material consequences of garbage can be short-circuited in a municipal setting by redistributions of aesthetic experience. In this case, the artist residency embedded in human and mechanical assemblages of waste disposal allowed the artist to transform materials into an aesthetic spectacle recategorizing the abject as sympathetic and a vital component of social and spatial discourse.

Sustainable development of art industry and a statistical analysis of the factors that influence the gallery prices of contemporary artworks

“…In the literature, researchers primarily address the sustainable development of art industry by studying the creation and conservation of artworks in a socially and environmentally responsible manner. Some example topics include community art projects (Chatkaewnapanon & Kelly, 2019), participatory artistic events (Rutten et al, 2019), artist‐in‐residence programs (Pinto et al, 2020), artworks drawing attention to the socio‐environmental issues such as poverty (Rarick, 2000), pollution (Johnson & Fürst, 2022) and climate change (Capstick et al, 2018), artworks created using recycled and scrap materials or through environmentally sensitive processes (Lithgow & Wall, 2019), and green exhibitions, galleries or museums (Ernst et al, 2016). These creations and artistic practices are often called sustainable art (Cooke, 2015; Guy et al, 2015), and primarily aim to transform people's thinking and behaviors by raising their awareness about sustainability (Chen, 2022).…”

Designing Collective Artist Residencies

“…A related concept is that of the 'artist in residence,' which emphasises the interaction between the artist and non-artists in their everyday organisational settings. In this scenario, the artist, who is an outsider, is embedded in an institution or organisation and typically creates work that "creates possibilities for ... free play or shifts between a given reality and another while leaving room for ambiguity and uncertainty" (Lithgow and Wall 2019). There are increasing numbers of residencies that invite socially engaged artists to develop projects in/with communities, indicating there is a trend towards residencies being "less about supporting isolated practice of artists and more about using art as a way of collectively responding to the global challenges [of] our time" (Badham 2017).…”